Before the annual "State of North Iowa" event kicked off at the Mason City Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, Clear Lake Bank & Trust's Vice President of Consumer Lending Danielle Pace could be seen practicing a brief monologue on-stage in front of a camera.
What Pace said in her two takes worked to summarize the local business community's mindset after a year of contending with all the repercussions brought on by a global pandemic.
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"We have a long way to go but by working together we can get through this and we can count on more North Iowa businesses to rally," Pace said.Â
The speakers following her at the event, who represented local government, business organizations and educational institutions, stuck close to that theme.Â
Near the top of the event, North Iowa Corridor Economic Development Corporation CEO & President Chad Schreck worked to offer some ways in which the North Iowa business community has rallied through the pandemic.Â
Schreck noted that despite the complications caused by COVID-19, multi-dollar expansions with the Kraft Heinz plant and the Golden Grain facilities in Mason City still happened. As did new developments such as the $35 million, 50-acre Bushel Boy greenhouse facility and the 133 unit housing complex known as "The River," which had its ribbon-cutting ceremony in January.
"Despite all the concerns, our region continued to move forward on various activities," Schreck said.Â
When businesses struggled to make progress over the past year, Schreck shared that about $435,995 went to 124 area local businesses as part of a "Small Business Relief Fund." That effort was organized by the governments of Cerro Gordo County, Clear Lake and Mason City as well as the North Iowa Corridor group.Â
Still such funding couldn't ameliorate the worst of the pandemic.
Schreck said near the end of his time that certain economic data for the region is mixed. Cerro Gordo County's unemployment rate for December stood at 3.4% which is better than the national average of 6.7% but slightly worse than the state average of 3.1%. Moreover, the average hotel occupancy rate for 2020 was 44.2%, which is almost 20% off from the 2019 average.Â
Mason City Chamber of Commerce President Robin Anderson also emphasized that point about traveling after the event concluded.Â
"Some of the things like tourism are going to take awhile to recover from," Anderson said. To her, that means it's imperative for the region to focus even more on the digital economy than it has before.
"One of the things we learned in the pandemic is that people can work from anywhere. So why not here?" Anderson said. "Or why not have enterprises located here that can work from anywhere?"
During his time, Tim Putnam, the director of NIACC's John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center, went through keys that he thought were necessary to thrive in the digital economy of a post-COVID world: create a digital workforce development, have access to digital jobs, offer an inclusive tech culture building, scalable tech entrepreneurship support and access to capital.Â
To work toward making that a reality on the local level, Putnam said that his organization is working on securing grant funding.
In the actual video that screened for the audience at the Chamber, economic leaders mentioned the group work they had done to help local business. But they also took care to tip their caps to the work the local businesses had done for themselves over the past year.Â
They shared the stories of Metalcraft switching to making masks and Fareway doing giveaways. The year 2020 came to mean plenty of confusion but also collaboration. A communal spirit between neighbors, store owners and public officials. Anderson confessed she couldn't possibly name everyone who did good work in the North Iowa area in the past year, so instead she simply said:
"You are the ones who will help us rally and recover."
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PHOTOS: Frosty winter scenery from around Mason City
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Jared McNett covers local government for the Globe Gazette. You can reach him at Jared.McNett@globegazette.com or by phone at 641-421-0527. Follow Jared on Twitter at @TwoHeadedBoy98.